Friday, April 11, 2003

It is good news from Baghdad. It seems to have all gone better than lots of people expected.
Saddam was a nasty piece of work.

On the minus side:

1) The americans invaded saying that Saddam was a military threat & was trying to put together weapons of mass destruction. But Saddam's army was capable of putting up surprisingly little defence against the americans (so why were they considered a current threat to the world?), and the american army has uncovered no major new evidence of Saddam having big deadly weapons.
and,
2) The fact that this victory turned out to be easy for the americans worries me (very few americans dead, though thousands of Iraqis died). I can picture the next time this sort of situation crops up, the americans won't be afraid to use their military again. Vietnam will be forgotten. It'll be a case of, do what we say or we'll do to you what we did to Iraq. And things might not go so smoothly next time.
and,
3) There are some very serious ramifications in other places. These events have upset people in volatile countries like Pakistan and Indonesia. A few days ago North Korea said that it was not going to go ahead with negotiations with the UN to reduce its arms. It is now MORE keen to go down the nuclear arms route. They've seen what America did to Iraq BEFORE Iraq got its hands on weapons of mass destruction. So North Korea is keen to get those weapons NOW before America decides to kill off their government. This is scary.

But for the time being, I guess we should just be happy with the good news.

Ding dong the witch is dead (or in hiding at least),
Which old witch?
The wicked witch!
_______________
matthew

Why is America so sure that Iraq has chemical weapons?

The US was the main arms supplier of iraq during the Iran/Iraq war and they kept detailed lists of everything that was bought and of everything that was used...and the surplus??

Italians are a rather suspicious people and a lot of these type of current affairs investigations are carried out repeatedly with a most suspicious eye.